Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has achieved incredible popularity in his native country and world-wide as well as rising critical acclaim. Murakami, in addition to receiving most of the major literary awards in Japan, has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Yet, his relationship with the Japanese literary community proper (known as the Bundan) has not been a particularly friendly one.
One of Murakamis central and enduring themes is a persistent warning not to suppress our fundamental desires in favor of the demands of society at large. Murakamis writing over his career reveals numerous recurring motifs, but his message has also evolved, creating a catalogue of works that reveals Murakami to be a challenging author. Many of those challenges lie in Murakamis blurring of genre as well as his rich blending of Japanese and Western mythologies and stylesall while continuing to offer narratives that attract and captivate a wide range of readers. Murakami is, as e Kenzabur once contended, not a Japanese writer so much as a global one, and as such, he merits a central place in the classroom in order to confront readers and students, but to be challenged as well.
Reading, teaching, and studying Murakami serves well the goal of rethinking this world. It will open new lines of inquiry into what constitutes national literatures, and how some authors, in the era of blurred national and cultural boundaries, seek now to transcend those boundaries and pursue a truly global mode of expression.

Acknowledgements.- Introduction: Challenging Murakami.- The Haruki Phenomenon and Everyday Cosmopolitanism: Belonging as a Citizen of the World.- Our Old Haruki Murakami and the Experience of Teaching His Works in Japan.- Haruki Murakami and the Chamber of Secrets.- Magical Murakami Nightmares: Investigating Genre through The Strange Library.- Critical Engagement through Fantasy in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.- Whats Wrong with These People? The Anatomy of Dependence in Norwegian Wood.- The Transcreation of Tokyo: The Universality of Murakamis Urban Landscape.- Youre Probably Not That Innocent Either, Mr. Murakami: Translation and Identity between Texts in Murakami Harukis Nausea 1979.- Challenging the Ambiguity of the te i (ru) Form: Reading Mirror in a Japanese Language Class.- Epilogue: Haruki Murakami as Global Writer.- Coda: Art in Conversation with Art: Another One of Murakamis Children I.- Author Biographies.